Luz Lizarazo

Luz Lizarazo

Las Ágatas creando el universo, 2024

Ink and gouache on paper

70 x 99 cm

TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

Luz Lizarazo

Vigilia un sueño, 2024

Ink and gouache on paper

49.5 x 70 cm

TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

In Las Ágatas creando el universo and Vigilia un sueño (both 2024), Colombian artist Luz Lizarazo charts a visionary cosmology of pain, protection, and poetic resistance. Created for her representation of Colombia at the 1st Malta Biennale, these ink and gouache drawings on handmade paper extend Lizarazo’s long-standing engagement with the body—its surfaces, scars, and spirit—into the realm of the sacred.

Both works are inspired by Saint Agatha of Catania, a third-century Christian martyr revered in Malta as the patron saint of breast cancer survivors, rape victims, wet nurses, and caregivers. Introduced to the figure by fellow artist Karim Estefan, Lizarazo encountered in Agatha a powerful emblem of resilience and care—an ideal symbol to reimagine within her ongoing exploration of embodied memory and spiritual healing. “That was a great gift to me,” she recounts. “The fact that she was Malta’s patron saint made it all the more ideal. So I decided to create my own versions of Saint Agatha.”

In Lizarazo’s hands, Agatha becomes more than a saint—she is a cosmic force. In Las Ágatas creando el universo, Agatha is imagined not in martyrdom but in creation. The composition’s ethereal washes and organic patterns suggest a universe brought into being through silent strength. The drawing is not an illustration of trauma but a metaphysical response to it: a luminous act of transformation that imbues the sacred with feminine agency and mythic resonance.

Vigilia un sueño, by contrast, turns inward. Translating as “Vigil a Dream,” the work evokes a threshold state—between sleep and wakefulness, vulnerability and resistance, grief and spiritual alertness. Its quiet composition holds space for the emotional aftermath of violence, for the gentle endurance of those who remember, mourn, and transform. It is a portrait of liminality: a body not simply surviving but bearing witness with tenderness and strength.

Together, these works trace a devotional and feminist cosmology in which trauma is neither erased nor glorified but transfigured. Lizarazo’s drawings, rendered on paper made from natural fibers and dyed with organic pigments, are not only visual meditations but ritual objects—fragile yet potent vessels of protection and testimony.

Where previous sculptural works such as those in her Piel series have explored skin as an archive of physical memory, these drawings move into the spiritual and symbolic. Yet the stakes remain the same: the reclamation of the body as a site of power, the insistence on care as a form of resistance. Lizarazo offers a space in which tenderness and violence, mourning and myth, coexist. The result is not only an homage to a saint but an invitation to imagine new forms of healing and sacredness in the aftermath of pain.